Until now, playing your old PS3 games on PS5 was an impossible dream. Sony has never offered native backwards compatibility with this generation, sending nostalgic people back to cloud gaming via its PlayStation Plus Premium offer. But an enthusiast has just demonstrated that the current console would nevertheless have the means to run these games locally, without official help.
The information comes from XDA Developers. A guy named Lowest Logan got his hands on a cryptocurrency mining card, boasting similar power to the PS5, and used it for a daring experiment. “Lowest Logan managed to use a cryptocurrency mining card with similar power to a PS5 to run Ubuntu.”
PS3 games playable without an original console
The most surprising thing about this experience? It worked. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, LittleBigPlanet and Watch Dogs have all been tested with encouraging results. If Watch Dogs shows poor performance and GT5 suffers from graphics bugs, a flagship title clearly stands out from the crowd. “LittleBigPlanet, on the other hand, runs flawlessly, matching the original game on PS3 in terms of graphics and performance.” This result revives an old frustration among PlayStation fans: why doesn’t Sony, with all its resources, already offer this emulation directly on the PS5?
Streaming, Sony’s only official option
For now, the only “legal” way to play PS3 titles on PS5 remains streaming. Via PlayStation Plus Premium, Sony provides access to certain PS3 games, hosted on servers configured to imitate their original architecture. “Sony’s solution to this problem is to bring PS3 games to PlayStation Plus Premium via streaming, allowing you to stream those games from hardware hosted on Sony’s data center servers, whose architecture is more closely aligned with that of the PS3.” But between latency, limited catalog, and dependence on the cloud, the experience remains far from ideal.
The PS5 capable… but restricted?
Successful emulation via hardware equivalent to the PS5 raises a legitimate question: what if the current console was, in reality, perfectly capable of launching certain PS3 games locally? For retro fans, this is a ray of hope. For Sony, more pressure to review its strategy. The ball is in the manufacturer’s court. In the meantime, some enthusiasts have already found their way to the past.